Enter the ‘Unioverse’: The Cinematic Sci-Fi Game Takes Shape on Polygon

Step apart, xenomorphs—a brand new alien is on the town, and his identify is Reyu.

Reyu is the primary playable character NFT to emerge from Random Video games’ upcoming Unioverse franchise. Thus far, the group has launched one Reyu comedian e book, 20,000 Reyu NFTs on Ethereum scaling community Polygon, eight brief fiction tales with visible illustrations, and “The Proving Grounds”—an immersive mini-game of kinds wherein gamers can race by means of a dystopian recreation setting and destroy bots as they attempt to prime the leaderboard.

However that is no Dookey Sprint—the Proving Grounds is an extremely lovely, cinematic expertise, and appears like the start of a AAA recreation. 

Have a look contained in the Unioverse:

It’s unsurprising that the Proving Grounds seems so good—Random Video games has a group of veteran recreation builders and writers. Random CEO Tony Harman helped create Grand Theft Auto whereas president at unique developer DMA Design, and Random Video games author Brent Friedman has labored on narrative growth for video games like League of Legends and Name of Obligation, in addition to for TV collection like “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” and “Star Trek: Enterprise.”

“With the Proving Grounds, we wished to showcase what our Unioverse heroes can do in a gameplay setting and supply a style of what’s to come back,” Random Video games CTO and co-founder Wyeth Ridgway advised Decrypt through e mail.

Throughout Decrypt’s Proving Grounds playtest, the lighting was practical and detailed, the character motion was clean and polished, and the environments seemed harking back to an “Alien” movie. The music was instantly interesting, whereas the maze-like map of the Proving Grounds itself felt a bit like a 3D puzzle—like if Valve’s 2007 smash hit recreation Portal grew to become the world from which Reyu should escape.

Reyu himself is a highly-detailed mannequin and is equal components menacing and chiseled, with a muscular exoskeletal armor, what seems to be a magic laser sword, and a gun that appears like half rifle, half crossbow.

The Unioverse web site describes Reyu as a “warrior monk,” and the corporate plans to launch extra characters from its franchise within the coming months and years. To me, Reyu seems like a human-xenomorph hybrid… think about the intergalactic peace—or chaos—such an alliance would deliver!

All comparisons apart, Ridgway advised Decrypt that the Unioverse will probably be extra like “a Roblox for AAA gaming” than a closed-source Web2 franchise. In reality, he emphasised that anybody can obtain the Unioverse property and inform their very own tales based mostly on the guardian lore.

What’s subsequent for the formidable franchise? The studio is taking a game-first and community-first method.

“The following step is the multiplayer, battle royale recreation, then we’ll share an SDK with all of the property and instruments,” Ridgway stated, “and proceed including heroes and performance so the group can construct no matter they need.”